Baby, Unplugged Transcript (038)

DAVID EISENBERG: Hi, this is Dave Eisenberg, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend Peter Horn. Today Pete will be talking with Sophie Brickman, author of the book Baby, Unplugged: One Mother's Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age. I've known Pete since he was my high school English teacher, and I've known Sophie since my last week in college, fifteen years ago. She and I are now married, living in New York City, and figuring out how to raise our three kids together. I resisted eavesdropping when Sophie and Pete recorded their conversation, but I have a feeling—call it fathers’ intuition—that it's going to be a great episode. Enjoy the show!

[00:55]

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today's show, Sophie Brickman, a journalist and mother of pre-school-age children who spent two years researching the intersection of parenting and technology. She's got some good news for you!

SOPHIE BRICKMAN: By and large, the way for kids to be optimally set up for life is to be bored and to play outside and to just be social and to be read to. That’s about it. It’s not more complicated than that.

[VO]: She has interviewed psychologists, neurologists, pediatricians, and children's book authors, among others—and makers of digital and analog toys:

SOPHIE: The simpler the toy, the better it is for them, because the more they do to the toy, the more imaginative they have to be, the more creative they have to be. All of that stuff is sort of taken away with many types of technology.

[VO]: She also confirmed that the killer app of the fifteenth century still deserves its acclaim!

SOPHIE: I spoke to one pediatrician who said, “If you asked me to go to the greatest minds in the world and make an object that could make kids smarter and more resilient and more social and better modern citizens of the world, they would come back with a book.” You cannot improve upon a book. … There is something that happens when you sit with a little kid in your lap and a book that has pictures where their neurons just go on fire.

[VO]: All that, and much, much more! Whether you're helping to raise young kids or not, you're gonna love this chat with Sophie Brickman.

[02:35]

[VO]: Hello and welcome to Season 6 of the Point of Learning podcast. Since 2017, I've sought through this passion project to bring you the best ideas I encounter about what and why and how we learn. Today I'm very excited to feature highlights from my interview with Sophie Brickman, because we delve for the first time in POL history into the topic of learning about raising very young children. New season, new turf! Sophie Brickman is a writer, reporter and editor based in New York City. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Saveur, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the anthologies Best Food Writing and Best American Science Writing, among other places.  Currently a columnist at The Guardian, Sophie wrote a monthly column for Elle interviewing influential women such as Nancy Pelosi and Joyce Carol Oates about their paths to success, served as Executive Editor of a travel publication launched jointly between Hearst and Airbnb, and was the Features Editor at Saveur. As a staff reporter at The San Francisco Chronicle, Sophie won first place in the 2011 Association of Food Journalists’ feature writing category for a piece about Napa’s French Laundry restaurant. I've got a link to that on the show page for this episode. Once upon a time, after attending the French Culinary Institute, she worked the line at Gramercy Tavern, making risotto and lamb ragù for the lunch crowd. Before that, she graduated with honors from Harvard, where she studied social theory and philosophy. Her first book, Baby, Unplugged, about the intersection of parenting and technology, which we'll be discussing today, was published by HarperOne in Fall 2021.

[04:20]

PETER: Sophie Brickman, welcome! We'll get to your wonderful book in just a minute, but first, I am bingeing The Bear on Hulu right now. Do you know that show?

SOPHIE: You wrote to me about it and I forgot to respond, but no, I have not. Now I need to binge it, I think!

PETER: It's, it's about a hand-carved sandwich shop in Chicago where they're trying a “French brigade” setup to reorganize the kitchen. It’s not important to get in those details. Super well-acted though, intense, but there are gorgeous shots of food and food prep. So I have been telling myself that it's cool to watch a couple half-hour episodes each night as I get ready for this interview with you, because you came to journalism first through your training—

SOPHIE: —through sandwiches, yes!

PETER: Well through like ragù, right? At the French Culinary Institute. You took a food-based path to get into writing. I think it's so interesting. Would you mind sketching that out briefly, just that sequence?

SOPHIE: Sure. So there was a very specific moment: I got a fellowship when I was in college to travel to Japan. I was spending the summer in Japan, and it was an absolutely eye-opening and amazing experience, but I was craving like mozzarella and pizza and pasta and all stuff that it was very hard for me to find where I was. I was in relatively rural Japan. And I was reading this book called Heat by a guy named Bill Buford who used to be the fiction editor of The New Yorker, I think. And he's a beautiful writer. The book was essentially about him discovering how much he loves food and then going to Italy and learning how to cook with Mario Batali. (This was years before [Batali] had all of this scandal around him.) And I was like, Is there a world in which I could write about food? That seems like such a dream. I don't know how I would ever do that. I graduated from college and I got a job at a nonprofit and I was making very little money. So I was living at home with my parents. And after sitting at an office job all day long, I would come home and change out of my H&M crappy business wear and cook at my parents' house. I kind of felt a need to use my hands or to, you know, see something from start to finish. I was a horrific cook, but I really enjoyed it. And because my parents are wonderful parents, they were like, Well, why don't you? If you want to go to culinary school, why don't you go to culinary school at night? Work during the day and go to school at night. And so I went to the French Culinary Institute, which I think has changed its name, but it's in Downtown Manhattan. So I would leave my office job at 5:00 and clock in at 5:45 and cook until 10:45, I believe, and then come home and do it all over again. It was three nights a week and it was brutal and I loved it. And so I sort of thought I was going to culinary school to learn to write about it. And then I ended up just working the line at a restaurant in New York City and really loving the comraderie of it, and the pressure, and the food. I learned a lot about food. Then I eventually ended up working as a food journalist at the food desk at The San Francisco Chronicle. But I found that the background of actually knowing how to chop things and move around in a professional kitchen made my reporting that much stronger. And actually, you know, chefs let me into their kitchen kind of because they didn't think I was gonna wildly screw anything up!

PETER: Well, I'm going to share on the show page for this episode a link to your award-winning piece on the world-famous California restaurant, The French Laundry, which was so vivid that I had to get up and make a cheeseboard, you know, to snack on while I read. But it leads me to ask, because you know how to do sophisticated things with food, as in prepare gourmet meals, but also with words, as in write and edit articles and features and now write a book, is there any apt comparison for you between those two kinds of creation? Or is it all contrast—is it all, you know, so very different?

SOPHIE: You know, I think the simplest similarity to draw between the two is that I went from working as a journalist and a newspaper to being an editor at a magazine and then working at an another magazine. And that feeling is very similar to me of everybody working for one goal and everybody has their own job to do, but you have to do it in sync. And at the end of the meal, everybody needs to feel like it was a cohesive meal. At the end of putting a magazine together, you need to feel like you've had everything start to finish and it sort of feels of the same piece, even though everybody's doing disparate parts. So I mean, I've never really thought about it in that way, but I think the drive and energy of a magazine close where you're up against deadline and everybody's staying up all night and going crazy is very energizing for me. It's a wildly different experience writing a book, I think, as any author will tell you, it's incredibly solitary. For most of it—even the book that I wrote, which involved a lot of reporting and stuff—it's like you're climbing a mountain by yourself for most of it, until you get to the editing phase and then it becomes very enjoyable and very communal but yes, I would say that working the line and working as an editor at a magazine, there are a lot of similarities there.

[09:35]

PETER: When you worked at Elle you wrote a monthly column interviewing influential women, such as sports commentator Jemele Hill, writer Joyce Carol Oates, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, public health expert Leana Wen, law professor Anita Hill, dancer Misty Copeland, and actor and NYS gubernatorial hopeful Cynthia Nixon. In all those interviews, what did you learn about how to establish the trust, or the rapport necessary to have the best possible conversation? I imagine it was a little bit different every time—or was it? How did you go about trying to have the best possible conversation? (Asking for a friend!)

SOPHIE: So first of all, I never was on staff at Elle. I was a contributor there. I respect the magazine a lot, and I think the fastest way to establish trust with someone is to do all of the reading you can about them, so that you're not asking them questions that they have answered a million times before, or so that you can pull something out from a long time ago and say, “When you were doing this role in 1984, blah, blah, blah …” It means that you have done your work. A lot of the people that I interviewed were very, very, very big names and had been interviewed a million times. And there's a fear as a reporter, that if you interview people who are incredibly well-spoken, a lot of their answers can be canned. You know, they've said the same version of an answer a million times, and it can get into a sort of call and response and what you want is a real conversation back and forth. And so I just over-prepared. I'm relatively not confident as an interviewer. And I got better doing that column, and I've gotten better as I continue to report, but I over-prepare. I remember, there's a director named Cary Fukunaga and he was kind of like coming up. I mean, he was probably relatively established back then, but it was not what he is now. And he was in San Francisco and I was sent to interview him because he directed Jane Eyre, one version of Jane Eyre that came out I don't know how many years ago [2011]. For preparation, I reread Jane Eyre, which was like wildly crazy. I should not have had to do that for a relatively short arts piece. And I watched a previous version of Jane Eyre that had been directed and compared them. It was too much. And I remember talking to my father. He was like, “What are you doing? This is like a thousand words, you're gonna be with him for 20 minutes?” But that's what I did. I think the more relaxed you can be in conversations, the better you are. I found that it calms me down to have read as much about these people as I can. So with Nancy Pelosi, she wrote an autobiography. I believe I read that. I try to read as much as I can beforehand.

PETER: Oddly enough, I did I read Jane Eyre to prepare for this interview.

SOPHIE: Oh, thank you!

PETER: But I found The Bear to be more fun!

[13:00]

PETER: I'm looking at the titles of some of your recent columns last year for The Guardian. Here's three of them: “If Covid’s ‘new normal’ makes you even more anxious than before, you’re not alone” [October 2021]; “Does overhearing your spouse’s work calls put you on edge? Me too. I found out why” [October 2021]; “After two daughters, I had my first son. The reaction was different—and revealing” [August 2021]. My question is, as with your book that we're about to talk about, Baby, Unplugged, there's a way that you situate yourself in your own story as a key element of the piece, sometimes. As a reader, I love that, but tell me about this choice.

SOPHIE: It brings up a million questions about what is and is not okay for somebody to write about: Is it okay for me to write about my kids before they're at an age to say that they want to be written about, or my husband, or whatever else. What I've found is that I write relatively humorously—or I try to—and I poke fun at myself and at my family in, I hope, not a bad way. And I find that as a reader, I enjoy human stories more than anything. So yes, I want the reporting and I want the headline and I want the data having been crunched and worked through by an author. But I find it easier to get into stories often, particularly about parenting and families, when it actually involves the first person. And there's beautiful stuff that is written that has nothing to do with the reporter, for sure, but the way that I figured out how to do Baby, Unplugged was to use my own experience as a jumping-off point for asking a bunch of questions about a given topic. And I found that my fears and concerns and questions were relatively universal for parents who were bringing up kids in a digital age. And so I felt it's comforting to read a story about somebody where you're like, Oh, she's in the same position. Okay, I'm not alone. I get it. And so that was my decision. I think that there are points on the spectrum. Nora Ephron famously said, “Everything is copy.” I think it was her, like grandmother or her mother was on her death bed and was like, “Use this!” It's like that's one end of it. On the other end of it is like, you cannot have a personality in your writing. And I think I'm somewhere in the middle. But for sure, I'm very careful about how I write about my family and my husband, who I write about a lot and is a character. He reads everything and gives it a stamp of approval. He's never once said no. I'm not, you know, using him in a particularly provocative way. But so I think my stuff is sort of a meld of memoir and reporting and research.

PETER: As I said, I really do enjoy it. I mean, it helps that I happen to know your husband, and so reading about him in this book, for example, I have to say, when you say you try to be humorous, I was not only chuckling, but like literally laughing out loud sometimes. And of course, from a story standpoint, he's an important foil.

SOPHIE: Absolutely.

PETER: Because he has this heavy tech bias, and you have kind of an anti-tech orientation, let's say, in terms of how you feel about it. He uses the tech. And you explain this in the book, and I've seen you talk about it in interviews as him kind of being an inspiration when you had a child, you being new parents trying to figure out what do we do with this little tiny human we’re responsible for, part of his impulse was like, Well, let’s get some tech and start measuring! And the questions began for you, like Where can it help? … So look at that! As promised, here we are talking about Baby, Unplugged, which I knew would make for a great conversation between us as soon as I learned that it would be published, which is about a year ago now (when I found out). I had the pleasure of getting to know your eldest child, Ella, who's now five, a little bit via Zoom during the first pandemic winter, so I've been persuaded for a while now that you and Dave are pretty amazing parents, and so your exploration—well, that kid didn't come outta nowhere!

SOPHIE: She's all herself. I don't know. We don't do anything, but thank you!

PETER: So like your exploration though, about how tech should be integrated into kids' lives where it could help, where it could hurt, as you note at the outset [of the book]. I knew that your that your account would be carefully researched and thoroughly informative. And I was right about that! But I also want to ask, because you are a person of many parts—a trained chef, a journalist, a writer, an editor, a wife, daughter, sister, a Great British Bake Off enthusiast, in addition to mother—how has it been, this experience of writing and talking about this book, which foregrounds your identity as a mother, vis-à-vis the other identities that you have?

[18:15]

SOPHIE: It’s a fascinating question, and one that I'm actually grappling with with the next Guardian column, which should be out shortly. I read a book called The Baby on the Fire Escape. It just came out in April, and it's about motherhood and creativity. And so the biographer [Julie Phillips] has about six or seven biographies of very important women writers and creators: Alice Neel, who’s a portrait artist, Ursula Le Guin, Susan Sontag, Doris Lessing, and a bunch of others. And her exploration, which took her 10 years to write, was sort of how did different women treat being a mother and being a professional, and in the Venn diagram of creativity and motherhood, where does it overlap and how does it overlap? And it's something that I basically read from start to finish, and then turned again and read it again with a pen and then called her and was like, “Can I interview you?” It changed my life, because it's very hard. I think my choice has been to integrate the two. So it's like, I used to be a journalist. And I wrote about what was interesting to me, which was food at the time. And then after five or six years of writing about Brussels sprouts and avocados, I was like, I can't do this anymore. I need to pivot somehow. And then I started writing about travel a little bit, and then I had Ella and—as has happened with many parents, but it certainly happened to me suddenly—my focus just zoomed in on this little person. And I was like, Wait, my role in the world has changed. And I don't really know anything about you. And I don't know anything about me in this role and I'm not sure what I'm doing. And the way that I kind of dug myself out of that anxiety and confusion was by reporting it and making it a subject of my journalistic background. And so the book was the result of that. I wrote a couple columns and realized that other people were also grappling with these questions. But in terms of my role as a mother versus what I write about, I've chosen to meld the two for now. We'll see how long I can keep this going. And then when I get bored of my kids, I'll pivot to something else—though I don't see that happening anytime soon!

[20:17]

PETER: Researching this book, you read other books, histories, studies, voraciously, but also interviewed experts from toymakers to app developers, to pediatricians, to specialists in child development. Sometimes it was a phone call, but many times you traveled, for example, to Rochester, New York, not far from where I'm sitting, to the Strong Museum of Play, which my wife Robyn and I had to borrow our niece and nephew to check out extensively, or as much as we wanted several years ago. We thought we were bringing them for undercover work, but we really just wanted to check out the Museum of Play! We didn't meet with the curators like you did. You also, for example, went to visit bestselling author Sandra Boynton at her home in Connecticut. For all the interviews you mentioned in the book, you distilled the essential information and set the scene such that I felt like I was right there with you, but I wanted to ask, is there one of these conversations that still stands out for you? I'm not asking you to play favorites, but was any just so surprising or rich, or the context of being in the place, if it was an in-person interview, that you still find yourself thinking about it from time to time?

SOPHIE: I think two of them stand out to me for sure, and for very different reasons. The first is—you mentioned Sandra Boynton. So like anybody who has a kid under the age of two probably has her board books. And I didn't really know them until I had kids, but now we have like bookshelves of them. And they're really funny and they're really charming. And they're for little, little, little kids. And this woman Sandra is incredibly prolific, so there are a bazillion of them and there's music and there's all this stuff. Being able to be in the space where she works— she has a barn that's connected to her house, that's like the next building over. She has a team of people that I think, you know, help promote stuff, but it's mostly just her sitting in this rural barn in Connecticut coming up with very funny and zany characters. She's incredibly warm and very welcoming. When I visited her, I happened to catch her the day after she had babysat for her newborn grandson. And so she was a little bleary-eyed and also kind of in the state of being around very, very little kids, the way that I feel like I have been constantly for the past six years. But she's very smart. I think there's sort of a misperception that writing children's books is sort of simple. It's like, Oh, it's just the simple thing that you do! It's incredibly hard both to capture their attention and also keep the parents involved. And she manages to do it in books that are like 10 pages long. And each page is like four sentences of four words on a page. They're very simple. They're funny. Her drawings are very charming. And so that was a wonderful interview to kind of see how amazing it is that she can do all this in her head in this barn by herself. I picked up little things when I was there. I think I mentioned this in the book, I don't remember, but she had, like, she opened up the fridge to get some milk and there was a Mickey Mouse pancake. And I was like, Of course you bake pancakes and they have ears on them! I don't know who that was for, but obviously that's your type of pancake! And then the other interview that I absolutely adored doing was Alison Gopnik. She's just a powerhouse in terms of her intellect, she's Adam Gopnik’s sister. She's a very, very lauded developmental psychologist and she runs a lab in Berkeley. So I went out there and interestingly, in terms of talking about how to get good interviews, towards the end of our interview, I thought it was the end. And I was like, This has been okay, but it hasn't been amazing. And then I actually don't remember, but something changed in our dynamic and I had put my notepad away, but I still had my voice recorder on. And we started talking about some other slightly tangential thing and then ended up talking for like another 45 minutes. And that was where the meat of the conversation came from. But she has written wonderful books about developmental psychology. She has an incredibly reasonable take about parenting. Her book The Gardener and the Carpenter I cite multiple times. The basic premise is that, you know, “parenting” as a verb is relatively new in our lexicon. You didn't [used to] parent; you raised kids. And the way that people think about parenting often is sort of like being a carpenter where you carve away and you make a perfect specimen by making the right choices. And what she says is if you treat it more like being a gardener where you have a plot of land and you give the plants, or your kids, as the metaphor goes, the environment in which to explore and grow in an optimal way, which means you give them some sunlight, you give them some water, you just let them be … it's kind of a different way of looking at the idea of parenting. And it sort of upends people's philosophies, particularly since she has shown in many ways that all of these minute decisions you think you're making that are gonna have an impact have no impact whatsoever! Once various basic needs are met, like whether or not you let the kid cry it out or sleep in your bed, or nurse or don’t nurse, or whatever, all these things that parents can tend to get very anxious about … there's no discernible difference, however many years out, which I took to be a very comforting notion. So those two, I think, for sure, but I mean, I loved all my interviews. I really did.

PETER: I wanted to ask about just one other one, because I was delighted to see Ellen Langer come up, the mindfulness expert, because she's somebody I've admired for a long time. Was there anything, I don't know, anything sparkly about that conversation? I think was a phone conversation, right?

SOPHIE: It was a phone call. I remember that conversation vividly because I got the book deal right before my second was born, like a month before she was born. I had this insane notion that I was gonna be writing and reporting through the entirety of her first year! I ended up finishing the book on time, but the first three months are just like, you're not sleeping and you're covered in spit-up, and you're completely delirious. And so she was probably two and a half months old and I was like, I'm gonna report, I'm gonna get all this stuff done. So I was like sleeping in one-hour chunks and I had Ella, who was at that point three years old. And I was like, I'm just gonna interview someone. I have to interview somebody about being mindful. And I'm anxious. And I feel crazy like, Who should I interview? And I typed in “important mindfulness” whatever, blah, blah, blah, and her name popped up. And I didn't know that much about her. And I quickly read her CV and was like, Oh, she's legit. And I emailed her and she wrote back and was like, “I'd love to talk,” at which point I was like, Okay, I'm gonna start researching about her. But in the course of that, I told Dave, who was a psychology major in college. He was like, “Oh my God, you're talking to Ellen Langer?” I was like, “Yeah.” He was like, “She said yes to an interview.” I was like, “Yes.” He was like, “She is a huge deal!” And so I started reading her stuff and then I fell in love with what she stands for. In the conversation she was very approachable. She doesn't have children of her own, but I think she has like step-kids and dogs and something else. She reminded me in certain ways of my mother. She's sort of like no bullshit, and very brassy and funny. So I was very grateful that she took this cold email from somebody who—I'm sure the email was just delirious. I don't even, I can't, I will cringe to read what I wrote, because I was literally operating on like one hour of sleep a night, but she was very gracious, even though I was probably a mess!

[VO]: Sophie's book provides a capsule  introduction to Ellen Langer's work on mindfulness and the mind-body connection, including Langer's research-based conviction that if the mind is fully in a healthy place, the body will be as well. According to Langer, part of mindfulness is the ability to think unconventionally and not just parrot back what you've been taught, or mindlessly trust what someone tells you. This ability helps keep us alive, aware, and happy. As Sophie writes, "It's a sense children are born with, that's rooted out after just a few years on earth. If we can emulate them, find the beauty in changing our underwear five times before breakfast, in slathering ourselves with sun lotion at night, we might just find ourselves feeling more grounded, more present" [page 60].

DAVE: It's me again, Dave. Because I show up periodically in Sophie's writing, Pete thought it would be fun for me to pop back into the show to do a Patreon ad. I'll let you be the judge of that, but the deal is that I'm not only a tech enthusiast, my day job now is as a venture capitalist, which means I spend all day thinking about worthwhile investments. But when Pete's podcast joined the Patreon platform two years ago, I didn't have to think about it at all. I immediately signed up, which you can too, by clicking the link on the show page. To be clear, I'm not talking about lots of money here. I kick in a few dollars each month because I believe in doing a little bit to help Pete spread great ideas about what and how and why we learn. You can join the many other listeners who have decided to do that too—giving 3 or 5 or 20 dollars a month—or actually, whatever amount you choose—or make a one-time donation. Click that link on the show page to learn more. If you care about lively ideas curated in an evergreen format that you can go back and enjoy again months and years later, this podcast is a good investment. Back to the show!

[29:50]

PETER: On another phone call, you spoke with the children's media historian Helle Strandgaard Jensen. You called her in Denmark, where she works at Aarhus University. I should back up and say that you wrote that “implicit in every conversation I'd had with experts”—and we're talking whether doctors, professors, content creators—there “was the notion that quality”—as in ‘quality content’—generally meant “educational” [page 209]—if Sesame Street produces quality content, it's because kids are walking away with some basic numeracy or literacy or something like that, some of these basic skills. But Jensen, the media historian and professor that you talked to in Denmark, she emphasizes like the value of giggling and silliness in young children's programming and not worrying that Scandinavian shows might not like prioritize reading skills so early.

SOPHIE: Yeah. I think that there is, particularly in America, and there are many reasons why this may be the case, but there's a lot of emphasis on getting your kids ahead early. The earlier the better. So there was, you know, Baby Einstein, which I think was debunked in court. There's Your Baby Can Read, similarly debunked. They were all fraudulent. It's the idea is that you can optimize every moment of your kid's life, starting at birth, or even in utero, and then the kids will, you know, get into an Ivy League school faster and be happier and more successful and whatever else, and kind of be at the head of the rat race. And actually [Alison] Gopnik, who we spoke about before, she had a very smart posit about why that is the case. She said, the rapid inequality gap that is getting bigger and bigger and bigger means that the middle class is winnowing and people are afraid that their kids are going to fall out of the middle class. And so there's this race to keep up. And like, Kids are born behind in various ways and how can we catch up? And so the result of that often is that when you come to technology, which is where my focus was, there are programs and apps and eBooks and stuff that are very “educational.” And I'm putting that in quotes because it's like, what does “educational” mean for a kid who's in preschool, who's under the age of five? And I talked to neurologists about actually what kids can learn from screens and what they should be doing. By and large, you know, the way for kids to be optimally set up for life is to be bored and to play outside and to just be social and to be read to. That’s about it. It’s not more complicated than that. The simpler the toy, the better it is for them, because the more they do to the toy, the more imaginative they have to be, the more creative they have to be. All of that stuff is sort of taken away with many types of technology. And when it comes to programs, there are valid reasons that Sesame Street can be wonderful, and also reasons where you're not exactly sure if it's the best thing for your kid to be watching. The idea that you can put your kid in front of Sesame Street and they are benefiting simply because they're learning a number or a letter is something that she took issue with because she said, “I like to watch television shows with my kid that I like to watch, so the two of us can sit down and laugh over something together.” That's a value that she thinks is important. And I don't know if you need research to back that up, but if you need the research, I did it! If you are co-engaging with your kid on anything, cooking something with them, playing with a toy with them, reading with them, watching television with them, playing an app with them—even though it's harder to play together—those are all moments where you're talking to them and interacting with them. And that's all good stuff, like really good stuff. So I think that in America, this focus on education and success is very, very narrow and very damaging because it teaches parents that they need to optimize these moments of childhood, when in fact what's best for the kid is really to kind of have free play. Helle told me that where she lives, her son isn't learning how to read until seven. That's just how it goes. You just wait until that age to sit down with your letters. And when you look at achievement-based, you know, how well kids are doing in school, for sure the Scandinavian kids are always off the chart compared to Americans. And so there's a question about what we should be cultivating. My takeaway from her was like, If you enjoy something and you want watch it with your kid, and it's not “educational,” go ahead and watch it with them! Make sure that it's not some horrible shoot-‘em-up film, but if you're watching with them, it can be really wonderful. And Ella for years loved the Muppets, various Muppets things, which are just silly and charming, but I don't know what educational value there is in watching like the “Mahnamahna” skit get over and over again. What she and I were learning was like, We both find this funny, and it's silly, and that's good too!

[35:25]

PETER: There's two major sections of the book. There's “Parentech,” where you address the tech that's marketed to parents, including devices, furnishing data on your newborn’s every sleeping moment and so forth. The second half of the book is “Babytech,” which deals with things like smart toys and interactive reading devices, more for the kids themselves. I wanted to pull just one of the topics from each half and ask you to riff on it a little bit. You've got a chapter in the “Parentech” half where you get into the question of “baby paparazzi.” The paparazzi, of course, in this case, are the parents who can't resist taking all the pictures they possibly can of their impossibly cute children. And you ask, If you're capturing the moment, are you ever in it? There's a tension between documenting the moment and being present to the moment, which has this other layer of complication with kids, because of course there are privacy concerns when it comes to sharing images of them online. So can you speak on some of the things that you considered as you sorted this out for yourself?

SOPHIE: Yes. You know, the idea that I'm now not gonna take my phone out and take a million photos of my son who's about to turn one is ridiculous. I have a billion photos that I'm never really gonna look at in any real way. But my question mostly was like, now that we have these little devices in our pockets all the time, what is it doing both to them to constantly be photographed—which kind of came up because, you know, Ella was able to look up and pose before she could tie her shoes. They know constantly that they're being filmed in some way, which is kind of dystopian and weird, and I wanted to investigate what that meant for the kids. And then also what it meant for us to be constantly documenting it. And I wanted to take a second and muse on why I felt the need to be documenting all of these things. Like what if I didn't catch her first step? That's okay! And so the reporting led me to speak to a bunch of different people, including a guy named John Palfrey, who was an internet law expert and the head of the MacArthur Foundation and the head of, I think, Andover for a while, fascinating guy. He's just great. And he wrote a book called Born Digital, which addresses this in part, what happens with privacy concerns and like, My kids are too little to know and There are a lot of people on Instagram who are putting photos of their kids up there, and that's a part of their brand. And what are the implications of that? I don’t know if I talked about this with John, but there are questions of what the future holds in terms of economic inequality, where people will be able to pay for their privacy. So you'll be able to pay and say, “I don't want any photos of my children on the internet,” for example. And if you can't pay then, like, that's just how it goes. So it's a scary notion of what can happen if you're posting photos of your kids left and right, which a lot of people do. But I think for me, the most interesting question to delve into was why I felt the need to capture it. And if, you know, just letting the kids' lives unfold, where I'm occasionally catching a photo could do the same thing and make me happier and calmer in the moment, which was the case. So now I try to keep my phone away as much as I can. I mean, like all of us, and then I fail, but I try!

[39:04]

PETER: You had a nice example of your mom's approach. She was very selective and curated some albums when you were growing up. And so you were documented, but it didn't feel like it was just endless pictures all the time. And I think she also made the choice not to have you pose? Or not have you smile …

SOPHIE: Right. I mean, they were very kind of like stark black and white, kind of more like Sally Mann, who takes photos of her kids where they're like running around naked in the woods. That was like closer to what my family photos were like. We never posed in front of monuments or anything, but you're reminding me, there was a part of that too about the difference between art and documenting … the amount of photos that I take versus the photos that I print out and will put on the wall. It's crazy. I have thousands and thousands and thousands of photos where I just—I take them mindlessly. And my mother who was taking photos on a Leica camera and developing them herself, you know, she had to be very particular about what she took photos of. And then she went through on these contact sheets with a red wax pencil and decided which ones she wanted to print out and got them printed and put them in the albums. It's a thing that we don't do, this generation doesn't do, I think a little bit to our collective detriment. But I mean, I don't have time to make a photo album. I’m just not gonna do it. But you know, maybe sometime in the future, I will get out my wax pencil.

[40:47]

PETER: When we were talking last month, just kind of spit-balling about what we might discuss today, I hadn't yet gotten to the chapter—it's actually your last chapter, where you focus on reading and reading-related tech, but you predicted I'd find it interesting, and how right you were! Reading is so much more complex a task than we generally consider. So for example, I didn't do it every year as a high school English teacher, but a couple of times just to drive this point home for students and to make it strange again, I would present juniors or seniors with small examples of different kinds of texts, like a cookbook, like a recipe, right? Like a single panel cartoon, like a snippet of dramatic writing, like a page of a scene from a play, a short poem, a news article, a map. And I would ask the kids to think and write and talk about what is actually involved in reading each of those. I mean, those are very different kind of texts, but “reading” is the name that we give that process that we apply to making sense of them. In each case, we're doing something different, but it's all called reading. I think I do want to go ahead and spoil that your research led you to conclude that old-fashioned books, at least for the time being, still have an edge over apps and tablets, if you have the choice, that is, if you have books around.

SOPHIE: For sure. I asked the same question to many of the people I interviewed at the end of my interviews, which was “What is the single best piece of tech that you've seen for children?” Depending on who I spoke to, I got wildly different answers from people in Silicon Valley to neurologists, whatever. But I spoke to one pediatrician who said, “You know, if you asked me to go to the greatest minds in the world and make an object that could make kids smarter and more resilient and more social and better modern citizens of the world, they would come back with a book.” You cannot improve upon a book, and it's really the best thing for young kids. That was something that was iterated over and over again in different interviews that I had. There is something that happens when you sit with a little kid in your lap and a book that has pictures where their neurons just go on fire. And they make connections and their synapses fire in some amazing way. And when you get into the nitty-gritty of the neurology, which I did, it's really amazing what has to happen to put strings of letters in to form sounds that then you can sound out and say out loud. Ella can now read, but the last year when she was learning how to read, it's amazing how she does it and how she can recognize certain words and how she can sound things out and how it just suddenly it's like rolling down a hill, it just goes faster and faster and faster. And you can see the connections being made. That doesn't happen on a tablet when lots of other things are going on. And for sure there are ways to dumb down tablets so it's as close to a book as possible, so there aren't animations, which are kind of too “hot” for kids. But the perfect medium for enjoying something and teaching kids about how important words are, and teaching them like lessons about how the world works? It's all in a picture book. There was a study that was done that they ended up calling it shorthand the “Goldilocks Study.” They put little kids, like preschoolers, through MRIs to see what was going on when they heard a story just orally, so they just heard it—they couldn't see anything; when they were shown an animation of the story; and when they were read a picture book. The animation was too “hot,” like their neurons were kind of like firing in a crazy way. They couldn't exactly focus on the words. The aural story at the young ages was too “cold”; they needed a visual to say like, Okay, that's what a rabbit looks like. That's what a little mole rat looks like, or whatever the case is. And that picture book was just right for them. Neurologically, things were firing in the right way. The guy who said the most important piece of technology is a book also said to me, Yeah, you can go to neurology and you can go deep into the science for this, but you can also just look at a kid who's engaged with a book and you can see that they're happy and you can see that they're calm and not jangled. And if you take the book away, they don't have a panic attack. They move to the next thing. Try doing that with an iPad where they've just been playing a game, it's like World War III! So I think, you know, just intuitively, there is something wonderful about a book too.

[45:38]

PETER: The subtitle of your book is “One Mother's Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age.” You touch on these things throughout, but I love the way that your conclusion kind of brings things together, because there's this through-line, of course, of parental anxiety. You feature your own worries and questions throughout. You're very honest and candid about them. And I would have to think that, you know, other people's anxiety about “Babytech” or “Parentech” is a major reason that most readers would gravitate toward your book. For this reason, I love this arc that that comes to completion in the conclusion where you talk about balance and sanity, granting yourself permission to feel sometimes that you're getting it wrong as a parent, which doesn't mean you are, of course! But for instance, you note that at least five of the experts that you interviewed said in various ways that between parents and children, friction is not only part of the process of parenting, but in fact, important and beneficial to both parties. Could I ask you to read the next few sentences there?

SOPHIE: Sure. “Embrace the middle-of-the-night wake-ups, the tantrums, the fourteen minutes it takes to choose a sock, and you'll become the kind of parent who really knows your child, who can help prepare her to thrive in a brave new technology-fueled world we are only beginning to understand. While I thought I'd been writing about how to navigate the technology-bombarded world of parenting, in fact, I'd been exploring what it means to be a parent and how to raise a human I actually want to hang out with. Friction and discomfort are all part of that process” [pp. 292-93].

PETER: I'll note that page 293, where you stopped reading, may be my favorite single page of the book, because you also declare that if you're gonna help your children actively learn and grow, and I quote, “I, the parent, also have to actively learn and actively grow” (p. 293). This is just so critical for any kind of teacher. I think this acknowledgement that If I'm going to do this, if I'm gonna take on this role of presuming to help somebody else develop, I better make sure that I'm developing, myself, and that I'm growing. And of course it would be the most natural thing not to focus on that part as a parent, but I love that you meditate on it at the end. Is there anything else that you might add along those lines? Any updates or insights or greater patience for yourself?

SOPHIE: Yeah, I mean, I think it's easier to write it than it is to internalize it. And particularly with a third kid, I sort of joke, Well, I wrote the book before the third kid. Now everybody's plugged in all the time because that's how I can function! But that's not really the case. I think that it's helpful to know that everything is a phase in parenting. And just when you think They won't be able to play alone on their own, they learn how to do it. I think a lot of it is cutting yourself some slack, and picking one or two people to ask questions to and not taking in so much information. There's so much information out there about what you should do and there's so much judgment about what you might be doing wrong. I think that certainly with three [children], you start to internalize that friction and discomfort are all part of the process. You just have to embrace the chaos a little bit and it can become very enjoyable. You know, I handed the manuscript in the week, I think, when Cuomo shut down New York because of COVID. And so it was like everybody's worlds got completely upheaved. And our reliance on technology completely changed and how we viewed technology became much more of a necessity. And we were stuck in a little apartment with two little kids and not really allowed to go outside. And so it really put these conclusions I came to to the test of how to be as graceful as possible as you navigate becoming a parent and raising little kids. And I think just knowing that you know your kid pretty well, and that it's okay if you feel overwhelmed and you're not exactly sure if you're doing the right thing. Everybody else feels like that. And if they say that they aren't, they're lying, I think. That's what I tell myself!

[49:55]

[VO]: That's it for today's show! Thanks so much to Sophie Brickman for joining me. You can learn more about her and find more of her work at sophiebrickman.com. Her book Baby, Unplugged is available at your favorite bookseller. Today's episode features an instrumental version of "Crack a Bottle, Run a Bath" by Shayfer James, with fiddle parts by yours truly. Shayfer has also graciously allowed me to use versions of his songs "Weight of the World" and "Villainous Thing" as intro and outro music for going on six seasons now, and he's about to tour yet again! Show dates and more at shayferjames.com. Finally, thanks to you for listening and supporting this podcast in whatever way you can. If you know a new parent targeted by ads about Babytech, please go ahead and share this episode with them. It will mean most coming from you. Point of Learning is written, recorded, edited, and mixed by me. I'm Peter Horn, and I'll be back at you in just about a month with a new episode featuring award-winning actor and playwright Ellen McLaughlin. See you then!